Waterford City and County Council shines spotlight on public lighting
Waterford City and County Council is one of twenty-one Local Authorities taking part in the National Public Lighting Energy Efficiency Project (PLEEP) to upgrade public lighting to LED.
In the Southern region 77,000 public lights will be retrofitted to LED and Waterford City and County Council is working with the lead local authority, Cork County Council, along with partner local authorities in Clare, Kerry and Limerick.
The primary objective of the project is to maximise energy savings, reduce CO2 emissions and enhance efficiency across the public lighting network by replacing the traditional light fittings with LED luminaires.
Projected energy savings of 50% will be made through the retrofitting program and 786 tonnes of CO2 emissions will be saved per year, which will significantly contribute to meeting Waterford City and County Council’s climate action target reduction of 51% in CO2 emissions by 2030.
Funding for the retrofitting of the LED lighting in Waterford is through the Department of Environment’s “Climate Action Fund” and Waterford City and County Council.
The process of retrofitting 10,000 public lights across Waterford city and county began in August last year and is anticipated will be substantially completed by August this year.
Fergus Gleeson, Director of Services, Waterford City and County Council said, “Waterford has set out an extremely ambitious strategy in its Climate Action Plan and this project aligns closely to the goal of establish Waterford as a decarbonisation zone (DZ) by 2040.
“The implementation of PLEEP copper fastens our commitment to reducing energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions. The project will also reduce the incidences of lighting outage when complete and reduce excess lighting with over designed installations.
“With advances in LED technology, the improved public lighting will add to enhanced public safety and an improved visual environment over traditional public lighting,” Mr. Gleeson added.
Le Chéile Lighting Specialist, acting on behalf of Cork County Council as the lead authority, has been contracted to carry out the public lighting works across Waterford city and county.
The company stated that “the works in the most part will present little or no disruption to the public or businesses within your area, and power will not be interrupted. Some deployment of temporary traffic management may be required in areas of high traffic volume or narrow roads to facilitate safe access to streetlights for work crews.”
A secondary objective of the PLEEP is to survey and collect data on the condition of the public lighting infrastructure to enable the region’s local authorities to strategically plan and invest in the upgrading of the public lighting underground infrastructure. This survey work has identified a number of infrastructure issues that need to be addressed before retrofit to LED can be carried out.
Deregulation within the electrical industry in 2009 resulted in Local Authorities taking over ownership from ESB Networks of underground cabling infrastructure servicing public lighting columns. This included concentric cables which had been installed since the 1950’s and represents around 15% of Waterford City and County Council’s public lighting cabling inventory.
Concentric cabling doesn’t comply with current electrical standards and where cable faults occur, the cabling must be replaced in full. As this cabling is at the end of its service life it is prone to faults.
While Waterford City and County Council will make every effort to ensure a timely repair is carried out, the time required to restore these cable faults can be considerable given the necessity to provide new ducts and cables and excavate pavement and footpaths to reinstate same.
The work is site specific and timelines for repair can be more than 3 months because the work is dependent on availability of funding and a specialised contractor. Technical human resources in the private sector are constrained at this moment in time.
In the short term to ensure public lights are repaired as faults occur, Waterford City and County Council will continue to maintain all public lighting and endeavour to keep the incidents of non-functional lights below 2% at any given time.
Public lighting faults can be logged on the Deadsure app or via Waterford City and County Council’s website https://waterfordcouncil.ie/services/roads-transport/public-lighting/